European Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2017

Vol. 4, No. 2, 644-655

Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries?

Sousa, Jesus Maria
University of Madeira
Email: angi@staff.uma.pt

Abstract
Starting from Theaetetus, one of Plato’s Dialogues, to discuss the nature of
knowledge (what?) and the ways to access to it (how?), and confronting
rationalist and empiricist positions, this theoretical analysis aims at critically
analysing the meaning of knowledge originated from the scientific revolution,
based on Bacon’s Novum Organum and the Cartesian rationality, as a way
to reach the “ideal” stage of humanity.
Turning to curriculum-making, questions related to “what to teach/learn” and
“how to teach/learn” necessarily evokes issues concerned with knowledge, a
scientific and socially valid knowledge.
But the “black-and-white” mental organisation evidenced by the knowledge
boundaries of various disciplines in hierarchical order composing the study
plans, characteristic of the modernist technological curriculum, is now
undermined by the recognition of the complexity of the phenomena to be
studied.
Challenged by new theories from the field of the hard sciences, the
curriculum studies has to seriously reflect about the real meaning of what is
a scientific and socially valid knowledge conveyed by the school in the
present context of paradigm shift and be consequent, i.e., be bold enough to
put the reflection into action.

Keywords: Scientific knowledge; Socially valid knowledge; Complexity;

Paradigm shift; Post-modernity.

1. Introduction
The critique of the academic disciplines as limited and confining is as long-standing
as the disciplines themselves. Historically, this critique has often taken the form of
referring back to an older, more unified form of knowledge, usually located in an
undisciplined subject such as philosophy (Moran, 2010, p. 13).
The questions related to “what to teach/learn” and “how to teach/learn”
necessarily evokes issues concerned with knowledge, a scientific and socially
valid knowledge, as the core of curriculum. And the concerns about the nature of
knowledge (what is it?) and the ways to access to knowledge (how do we get to
it?) are as old as the philosophy itself, leading us to the field of the epistemology.
Plato, in one of his Dialogues - the Theaetetus (Bostock, 1991; Waterfield,
1987), put the famous mathematician Theodorus of Cyrene’s brilliant young
student Theaetetus dialoguing with Socrates and with his teacher. Questioned
about "What is knowledge", Theaetetus started mentioning a list of disciplines,
such as geometry, astronomy, arithmetics, arts and crafts.
Not pleased with Theaetetus’s answer, Socrates refined the question: "But
what is knowledge exactly?" This problem is much more complex, since in Greek
as in English, there is just one word, contrarily to what happens in Portuguese
(“saber” and “conhecer”) or in French (“connaître” and “savoir”), for example. In
this Dialogue, Socrates presented a tripartite division of knowledge:
Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries? 645

1. Knowing an object (a person, a thing): knowing by contact, corresponding to

"conhecer" and "connaître";
2. Knowing how (knowing how to do things): knowledge of skills;
3. Knowing that: a propositional knowledge.
The Dialogue went on focusing on this third dimension, referring to "saber"
and "savoir". It is also on this dimension that we are interested to critically
analyse in this paper: the Socratic propositional knowledge as the source of the
scientific and socially valid knowledge prescribed by the curriculum.
Apart from the association of knowledge to perception, given the argument
that a breath of wind can cause a chill to someone who is more sensitive to cold
than to another person, Socrates elicits from Theatetus, making use of the
maieutic method, like a midwife who helps a woman give birth, the idea of
knowledge as belief: we must believe what we think we know. And then, he
continues to reflect, it is necessary that this belief is true. Quite often it is proved
that what we thought to be true is not true after all. Therefore it is necessary to
justify such a supposedly true belief. So the justification was the third condition of
knowledge. Deductive, inductive or abductive arguments are needed to configure
the existence of the knowledge we are now writing about: knowledge as a belief
(1) which is true (2) and justified (3). “The preliminarily standard definition is that
knowledge is a justified true belief” (Grayling, 1996, p. 37).
And now the second classic question is: how to get to it?
Abstractly speaking, and since every belief is based, in chain, on another
one, there will be a point where you can no longer go further, because it will not
be possible to scrutinize any other justification in the end. We say here that these
beliefs are self-justified, or self-evident: we are then at the level of the
foundational beliefs, that is to say, the origin of everything, namely the myth of
the datum, the pure datum. And then we can question about whether there is or
there is not a prior knowledge... In fact we can only say that we do not know
something, if we know something.
But has knowledge existence regardless the human being who wants to
achieve it? Is knowledge just waiting to be discovered? How do we get to it then?
Or is knowledge a reality constructed by the subject?
Throughout the history of the epistemology, we have been confronted with
two schools of thought: rationalism and empiricism. For the “rationalists”, the
objects of knowledge were propositional, that is to say, they were truths that were
achieved by rational, logical-mathematical inferences, by the Reason. The only
sources of knowledge were the ideas of the intrinsic Reason, as reflected in the
syllogistic reasoning, for example, where the major premise was a “kind of self-
evident and undeniable statement regarding a metaphysical truth or a dogma”
(Sousa, 2000, p. 19). In this case, mathematics and logics were the core
disciplines necessary to achieve this knowledge.
As for the “empiricists”, what counted were the natural sciences, with their
procedures of observation and experiments. For them, one came to the truth by
experience, by the senses, although they recognized some limitations in this
approach: the colour, the taste, the smell, the sound, the texture of an object
varies according to the condition of the subject who perceives it, or the conditions
under which the object is perceived. To overcome this perceptual relativity, some
646 J. M. Sousa

instruments were created, such as microscopes or telescopes as more refined

extensions of the human senses.
Over time, these two groups have been struggling over about the nature,
the origin and the reliability of knowledge. The Aristotelian and medieval
knowledge were used to face with despise everything that was not exclusively
based on the Reason. For them the knowledge applied for practical resolution of
daily problems had not the same status of that propositional knowledge exposed
by Socrates in Plato’s Dialogues. It was only an ordinary knowledge, at the level
of the common sense: irrelevant, illusionary and false.
As for the Curriculum, since this word has entered the educational lexicon,
the concept of knowledge has also been changing according to different
paradigms.
Contrary to Gundem (2010), who considered that the word Curriculum was
first used by Daniel Georgius Morhof (1639-1691), professor in Rostock from
1660, Doll (2002) anticipates its use to almost a century before, saying that “[i]t
was in one of Ramus’s works, a taxonomy of knowledge, the ‘Professio Regia’
(1576), published four years after his death, that the word curriculum first appears
referring to a sequential course of study” (Doll, 2002, p. 31).
But both authors are unanimous in considering that Curriculum appeared
as a reaction against the medieval Scholastics which aimed at the validation of
Christian dogmas by means of the Platonic and Aristotelian logic in the attempt to
reconcile Faith and Reason. In a context of solitary deep study, knowledge was
achieved by the students who were let alone unravelling complex and confused
information.
So Curriculum aimed at the simplification of knowledge making it
accessible to the students with a purpose of “teaching and not thinking”, focusing
on Didactics rather than on Dialectics. The taxonomy of knowledge, or syllabus
sequentially arranged in an “unbroken linear progression” is by Doll (2002) called
a “logical map of knowledge”. Therefore there is a close relationship between “the
mapping of knowledge” and “the accomplishment of instruction”. That is to say: to
make knowledge clear and understandable it should be simplified as Hamilton
says: “Starting with a map of knowledge, Ramus reduced such knowledge into a
tree of knowledge, using repeated binary division” (Hamilton, 2003, p. 08).

2. Modern Scientific Knowledge

The idea of simplification of knowledge, to make it accessible to other non-
ecclesiastic people, was contemporary to the emergence of science, as the
substitute of God who had reigned in the medieval ages. The solution for all
problems of the mankind was then optimistically laid on science and technology,
in the hope to control nature which had been in God’s hands before.
The negation of the Earth as the centre of the universe has shaken the
current esoteric conceptions, triggering a revolution in the way of organizing
men’s way of thinking and reading the reality. Modern science, born with the
scientific revolution of the sixteenth century, brought another kind of rationality to
access to knowledge
... represented by Copernicus’s heliocentric theory of planets motion, Kepler's laws
about planets orbits, Galileo’s laws on the bodies falling, the great synthesis of
Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries? 647

Newton’s cosmic order and finally the philosophical awareness given by Bacon and
particularly Descartes (Santos, 1988, p. 3).
The Aristotelian deductions started then to be refuted. In the Preface to
Novum Organum, Francis Bacon (1620/2002) showed the relationship between
these two types of approach to knowledge (rationalism and empiricism),
emphasizing the primacy of knowledge that enables action.
... But if there be any man who, not content to rest in and use the knowledge which
has already been discovered, aspires to penetrate further; to overcome, not an
adversary in argument, but nature in action; to seek, not pretty and probable
conjectures, but certain and demonstrable knowledge — I invite all such to join
themselves, as true sons of knowledge, with me (Bacon, 1620/2002).
In one of his Aphorisms on the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of
Man (Aphorism LXXI), Bacon picked up the prophecy of an Egyptian priest about
the Greeks, to compare them to children:
they were always boys, without antiquity of knowledge or knowledge of antiquity.
Assuredly they have that which is characteristic of boys: they are prompt to prattle,
but cannot generate; for their wisdom abounds in words but is barren of works
(Bacon, 1620/2002).
In this case the focus is an objective knowledge aiming at some kind of
action, a concrete knowledge with no interference of human values or religious
beliefs. And if it is true that modern science raised Man to the place of an
epistemic Subject, the fact is that this same science expelled him from the
scientific area, as it had done to God.
This new scientific rationality aimed at isolating the researcher from his/her
object of research, in favour of a knowledge the most possibly objective, not
permeable by human emotions. It was then recommended the “inductive method,
which means the use of multiple observations of the phenomena and not
religious assumptions or other kind of authority to reach conclusions or
generalizations” (Sousa, 2000, p. 19). The observation of natural phenomena
should be free, non-committed and systematic, bearing an attitude of permanent
distrust of the evidences generated from the immediate experience.
In this new type of scientific rationality, the “ideas” were not ignored. They
configured the hypothesis, not as an assumed truth at the departure (the major
premise) but as a question to be ascertained by observation and
experimentation. In his “Discurso sobre as ciências” (Discourse on Sciences),
Santos drew our attention to the quantification and simplification of the modern
scientific knowledge:
From this central place of mathematics in the modern science derive two main
consequences. Firstly, the quantification: to know means quantifying. The scientific
rigor is determined by the rigor of the measurements. The intrinsic qualities of an
object are, so to speak, disqualified and replaced by the quantities that could
eventually translate them. What is not measurable is scientifically irrelevant.
Secondly, the simplification: the scientific method is based on the reduction of the
complexity (Santos, 1988, pp. 4-5).
And this happened in a context of stability and constancy, in the
presupposition of an absolute order that ruled over everything in the universe, a
context in which it would be possible to predict future situations based on present
situations, or to provide for situations over there, on the basis of situations here.
648 J. M. Sousa

Quoting Osberg, “[w]ith cause and effect thinking we understand the world in a
mechanical sense where everything is made up of isolated parts and their rules
of interaction and there is only a single way for the process to ‘unfold’” (Osberg,
2009, p. vii).
Modern scientific knowledge thus assumed a functional and utilitarian
dimension aiming not so much at understanding the essence of Nature, but at
knowing it in order to dominate and transform it.
Basically, we were witnessing the affirmation of the nomothetic sciences able to
explain and foresee general laws: faced with similar conditions, the same results
would occur whether here or there, whether they were yesterday, today or
tomorrow. This universal and timeless determinism made everything seem
extremely simple and transparent (Sousa, 2000, p. 21).
If Isaac Newton (1642-1727) had dared to go beyond the distinction
between Heaven and Earth, seeking to show that the laws that governed the
celestial sphere were the same kind of those causing the falling of an apple, he
was not able, however, to abandon the static cosmic vision of the galaxy – The
Milky Way as the entire universe – which remained rooted in the minds of
scientists until the twentieth century. According to E. Burtt (1932/1955, cited by
Doll, 2012), Newton’s metaphysical assumptions gave modernism’s cultural
milieu its distinctive flavour.
Four of these assumptions are (1) that ‘Nature is pleased with simplicity’; (2) ‘To
the same natural effect we must … assign the same cause’; (3) ‘God in the
Beginning formed Matter into solid, massy, hard, impenetrable particles’; and (4)
that ‘Nature is conformable to herself and simple’ (p. 15).
It is then understandable why all hopes for the resolution of natural and
social problems that plagued the world were laid on this scientific knowledge.
There was an absolute belief that we would reach the final and ideal stage of the
evolution of the humanity. For example, the theory of Auguste Comte (1798-
1857) on the Positive Social State is an example of this general belief, as the
stage reached after having overpassed the previous Theological and
Metaphysical States; the same way as it is the theory of Herbert Spencer (1820-
1903) on the Industrial Society, facing it as the most civilized and developed
society, after the Simple, the Double and the Triple composite Societies, based
not only on its form of organization and division work, but also on the
decentralization policy and the idea of the State serving the citizen, the
representative government and free initiative, religious freedom and monogamy,
among other aspects. We can also mention the theories of Émile Durkheim
(1858-1917) on Organic Solidarity through the division of work, which in his view,
would make the individuals become interdependent, cohesive and supportive, not
by family, religion, customs or traditions, as in the type of Mechanical Solidarity
characteristic of pre-capitalist societies, but because, like a biological organism,
where each organ has a function and depends on others, in society too, each
individual would have a specific function, needing others for other functions. That
is what, in his view, would generate solidarity among men.
These theories are good examples of the optimism the modernity started to
congregate in its break with the medieval past, in which everything was due to
one single and supernatural cause. The modernity was finally giving way to
Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries? 649

a social condition that is both guided and sustained by enlightened beliefs in

rational scientific progress, the triumph of technology over Nature and the ability to
control and improve the human condition by applying all this scientific knowledge
and technological expertise to the field of social reforms (Hargreaves, 1998, p. 9).
Imbued with a desire of transparency and simplification, reflected in the
decomposition of the whole into parts, or in the Cartesian separation between
Subject and Object (ego cogitans and res extensa), the subjective emotions were
put aside to formulate general laws at the light of observed regularities.
Sharing the same paradigm, understanding it as “... what the members of a
scientific community have in common”, and thinking about scientific community
as “... people who share the same paradigm” (Kuhn, 1983, p. 240), the
affirmation of Curriculum as an area of study and research could not be made but
through the technological model launched by Bobbitt (1918; 1924) and reinforced
by Tyler Rationale, stressing the importance of the objectives to be defined
before anything else in a linear instructional design: objectives unfolded into
cognitive, affective and psycho-motor taxonomies, from the simplest to the most
complex operations; and general objectives unfolded into specific, behavioural
and operational objectives.
It is worth reflecting about the ideology of order, routine and method,
characteristic of a Protestant culture installed by the Puritans in England and
America (Doll, 2012) two centuries ago that led to the methodization and
simplification of knowledge, through a Curriculum strongly expanded with the
help of the printing press. Metaphorically speaking, the passage from the ‘text’
(solitary study in monastic and cathedral schools) to the ‘text-book’, with the
purpose of simplification and fragmentation of knowledge to generalize it,
demanded a sort of selection of some knowledge, in detriment of other. This is
what Sousa and Fino (2014) called “o pecado original do currículo” (the original
sin of curriculum) that has marked the History of Curriculum until now.
Nevertheless, talking about the modernism’s tendency to categorize, within the
“Aristotle’s either/or (excluded middle) logic”, Doll (2012) brings some hope
saying that “such logic with its sense of domination – right better than wrong – is
being challenged today” (p. 14), to which I add: just at the level of curriculum
theory.

3. Scientific Knowledge and Complexity

As a matter of fact, the ‘black and white’ thinking to achieve scientific
knowledge, in the line of a cause-effect or stimulus-response mechanistic and
deterministic logic has already started being undermined by the advent of the
new sciences of chaos and complexity and the recognition of the density of the
phenomena to be studied, in a trend curiously initiated at the level of the hard
sciences.
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) demonstrated in 1929 that, after all, the
universe is not static, but constantly expanding: the conclusion was drawn from
the finding of nebulae in other galaxies moving away from us at tremendous
speeds. This discovery raised the question about the origin of the universe, giving
bases to the Big Bang theory formulated by Georgy Gamow (1904-1968), a
Russian-born American physicist.
650 J. M. Sousa

Nevertheless it will be Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who initially resisted to

the idea of a cosmic origin, to question Newton’s independent concepts of space
and time, presenting the idea of space-time as one geometric entity, with his
theory of relativity (special relativity, in 1905, and general relativity, in 1915, this
latter adding the effects of gravity to the former).
Gaston Bachelard (1884-1964), when referring to the era of the New
Scientific Spirit in contrast to the Pre-scientific and Scientific ones, clearly says:
Nous fixerions très exactement l’ère du nouvel esprit scientifique en 1905, au
moment où la Relativité einsteinienne vient déformer des concepts primordiaux
que l’on croyait à jamais immobiles (Bachelard, 1993, p. 7).
The quantum mechanics of Max Planck (1858-1947), the probabilistic
theories, the wave mechanics of Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), the
correspondence and complementarity theories of Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and the
uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) among others have
brought a new conception of physics which already contemplates the
irregularities, disruptions and disintegrations, reconsidering the inevitable
interference of the Subject in the observation, striking down the absolute vision of
what is ‘reality’. In this sense, knowledge appears as “representations of reality”
(Osberg, 2009, p. v).
Thus science itself is redefined, the same way as the access to knowledge,
in a rupture with the prevailing paradigm. What is scientific knowledge then? Are
scientific theories descriptions of the ‘reality’? Or are they just instruments that
allow us to better understand the ‘reality’ until other better explanations emerge?
For Karl Popper (1902-1994) “all science is based on quicksand”. His principle of
falsifiability underlines the idea that a theory is scientific only if it is proved that it
is false. “Je les conçois les théories scientifiques comme autant d'inventions
humaines, comme des filets créés par nous et destinés à capturer le monde”
(Popper, 1984, p. 36).
The philosophy of mathematics itself, from the point of view of the
incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), recognizes that the
measurement accuracy of mathematics, like any other form of accuracy, is
always based on a selectivity criterion. Someone has always to ‘subjectively’
select the ‘objective’ criterion.
A new relative and complex order emerges, “a complex sense of order,
where order and disorder are structurally intertwined” (Doll, 2012, p. 14),
spreading from the physical and natural world to the human and social field.
It's a new order, where it will be very difficult to accept simplistic and dichotomous
divisions, I would say a Cartesian order divided into reason on the one hand, and
emotion on the other, right on the one hand and left, on the other, man on the one
hand, and woman, on the other, black, on the one hand, and white on the other.
On the contrary, we are now experiencing the time of ethical, philosophical,
political and ideological mestizage (Sousa, 2009, p. 3).
In this context, the book by Jean-Francois Lyotard, “La condition
postmoderne”, is published in 1979, laying the foundations for thinking about
(scientific) knowledge in the new era we now live. Being a pioneer in the use of
the term ‘postmodernity’ and featuring knowledge as a kind of scientific
discourse, Lyotard announces the end of metanarratives. For him, metanarratives
are the major explanatory schemes of the world, the absolute truths we can find
Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries? 651

whether in ideology or in totalitarian systems of knowledge as it was the case of

science itself. Patrick Slattery synthesizes this way:
Metanarratives do not problematize their own legitimacy, and thus they attempt to
order history logically according to the preconceived modern notions of totality as
reflected in patriarchal, technological, colonial, anthropocentric, rationalistic,
militaristic, and Eurocentric paradigms. These modern paradigms deny the
historical and social construction of their own first principles (Slattery, 2006, p. 41).
The modern metanarratives ignore the specificity, the contingency and the
difference. Analysing Lyotard’s position, Henry Giroux affirms that “[a]gainst
metanarratives, which totalize historical experience by reducing its diversity to a
one-dimensional, all-encompassing logic, Lyotard posits a discourse of multiple
horizons, the play of language games, and the terrain of micro-politics” (Giroux,
1993, p. 52).
While Anthony Giddens believes that the transitions that are occurring
“should rather be seen as resulting from the self-clarification of modern thought,
as far as the remains of tradition and providential views are being removed”, he
does not hesitate saying that “[w]e have not come beyond modernity, we are
living precisely a phase of its radicalization” (Giddens, 2000, p. 35). On the other
hand Gilles Lipovetski (2004) prefers to use the term hypermodernity instead of
postmodernity, just to convey the idea that there is not a rupture with modernity
yet, as the prefix ‘post’ implies, but an accentuation of specific characteristics of
modernity, such as individualism, consumerism, hedonism, and others.
Being either a break or an evolution of modernity, naming the present era
either as post-modernity (Lyotard, 1984), radicalized modernity or late modernity
(Giddens, 2000), liquid modernity (Bauman, 2006) or hypermodernity
(Lipovetsky, 2004), among other designations, what is true is that we are living in
a time marked by dizzying acceleration of change at all levels under the umbrella
of information and communication technologies, which have brought a new
meaning to globalization. We are living in a period marked by the collapse of the
components that shaped modernity. Stability, permanence, security and certainty
are hardly words that fit into our everyday lexicon nowadays.
And if we consider the relationship between language and thought, we
would say that the postmodern mental organization is based on the so-called
“absolute relativism”, on the systematic doubt against “universalizing
presumptions” (Lyotard, 1984), in a permanent questioning of the neutrality and
the universality of the Reason, because “the postmodern world is fast,
compressed, complex and uncertain” (Hargreaves, 1998, p. 10).
And in this environment of uncertainty, complexity and chaos, how is
knowledge envisaged? Is it a whole, resulting from the summing up of well
divided and delimited parts? How strict and static are the knowledge boundaries?
For Santos (1988):
1. All natural-scientific knowledge is social-scientific;
2. All knowledge is local and total;
3. All knowledge is self-knowledge;
4. All scientific knowledge aims to become common sense.
In this new context of paradigm shift, boundaries between what is scientific
knowledge and common sense are not clear the same way as the boundaries
between the physical and natural sciences and the humanities and social
652 J. M. Sousa

sciences start disappearing. There are not clear boundaries between different
disciplines, and even less boundaries between the Subject who investigates and
the Subject/Object to be researched...
And about the ways to access to knowledge, Paul Feyerabend (1924-
1994), with his famous “Against Method”, brings the anarchist vision of science,
rejecting the existence of universal methodological rules for considering them
elitist and even racist. It is interesting to know that this book was born from a
project initially conceived by himself and Lakatos, to be entitled “For and Against
Method”, where each one would have the responsibility to defend his position: a
position in favour of a rationalist view of science, by Lakatos, and a position
against it, by Feyerabend. However, the premature Lakatos’s death in 1974
prevented them to successfully complete this plan, only remaining Feyerabend’s
“methodological anarchy”. This author asked, for example, about the reason why
the effectiveness of the rain dance or the astrology was refused just because it
was not supported by scientific research. In his view, science was becoming as
much repressive as an ideology, regarding other alternative routes (traditional or
not). And if science was liberating, in the beginning of its affirmation, it is now
imprisoning us in a supposedly scientific dictatorship.

4. Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries in a Paradigm of

Complexity?
Focussing the attention on education in general, inspired by Morin’s
paradigm of complexity (Morin, 1990), Sousa (2000) reflected on scientific
knowledge about education, saying that it is ‘global and systemic’, ‘unique and
specific’, ‘procedural and dynamic’, ‘uncertain and unstable’, and ‘personal and
subjective’ (Titles of sub-chapters).
For this curriculist, the scientific knowledge in education is ‘global and
systemic’, because it is not possible to parcel it in separate subjects. Any analysis
of an educational phenomenon needs a multitude of references from diverse
fields ranging from history to philosophy, from psychology to sociology, from
economics to policy, from methodologies to practice: any scientific analysis in
education needs a multi-referential view (Ardoino, 1993). Acknowledging the
overall dynamics of a system (Bertalanffy, 1968), we know that the intervention in
one of its subsystems immediately echoes in all the other ones, because an open
system is characterised by the existence of networks of relationships with
“qualities of wholeness, interdependence, hierarchy, self-regulation,
environmental exchange, balance, adaptability and equifinality” (Littlejohn, 1982,
p. 33), as it is the case of a situation with living beings: a society, a community, a
school, a group of students, and so on.
The scientific knowledge in education is also ‘unique and specific’, having
to do with a given situation, a certain place and certain players, hic et nunc,
without pretensions to generalization. Instead of large groups, it is interested in
the study of small communities, a school, a class, a group of teachers, or a single
teacher. The case study is so privileged, understanding the experience as unique
and unrepeatable. It is very difficult to extrapolate the results of a certain research
to other contexts, losing the statistic sample its raison d'être.
The scientific knowledge in education is ‘procedural and dynamic’ too,
requiring a historical overview of the ecological context, from the past, to fully
Knowledge and Curriculum Boundaries? 653

understand it, because any situation, the most concrete it may be, is shaped by
its historical and anthropological roots. It is no longer possible to delineate with
rigor the precise temporal boundaries of a particular event, or to cut the dynamics
of educational phenomena in well-defined slices. It is necessary to know the life
stories of the subjects involved to get to the meaning of an educational
phenomenon.
The scientific knowledge in education is also ‘uncertain and unstable’
because it cannot give us absolute certainties or securities that previously the
impersonal, anonymous and superior determinism did. It is not through the data
quantification and the measurement accuracy and its statistical analysis that we
conclude about the truth of the observed facts. The permanent falsifiability of
conclusions in the research findings is what opposes science to beliefs or
religious and ideological dogmas.
Finally this curriculist states that scientific knowledge in education is
‘personal and subjective’ because it takes the subjectivity of the researcher as a
tool for research, emphasizing the perceptions, conceptions and representations
not only of himself/herself, but those of the subjects of research, trying to
apprehend the meanings given by them to the observed situations, opening the
way for methodologies of ethnographic approach and action research in
education, as if the researcher were a native of that particular culture. Therefore,
knowledge in education demands personal and subjective implication of the
researcher.
As we see, challenged by new theories from the field of the hard sciences,
the social sciences and particularly the education have started rethinking about
the nature of knowledge and its boundaries when dealing with their object of
research. Defending knowledge as the “never ending conversation”, Weinberger
(2005), cited by Osberg (2009, p. ix), affirms:
There is a big difference between a relativistic world in which contrary beliefs
assert themselves and a conversational world in which contrary beliefs talk with
one another. In the relativistic world, we resign ourselves to the differences. In the
conversational world, the differences talk. Even though neither side is going to
“win” – conversation is the eternal fate of humankind – knowledge becomes the
negotiation of beliefs in a shared world.
But if there is already a general consensus about the complex nature of
knowledge, specifically in education as scientific object of research, how does the
school operationalise this idea in terms of learning and teaching? Being the
school the privileged place for knowledge initiation, how does the Curriculum
reflect the ongoing complexity thinking of the academy at the present moment?
How to put in action an alternative to simplistic linear models in education that
fragment knowledge in autonomous disciplines with strict times to go in and go
out, even without the ringing bell? How to analyse the world phenomena at
school? Will it be enough to envisage the problems from a disciplinary view? Or
should we cross the boundaries of disciplines to access to that scientific and
socially valid knowledge in its foundational complexity?
Exploring the common spaces of education and complexity, Davis and
Phelps (2005) relate transphenomenality with transdisciplinary and
interdiscursivity saying that
654 J. M. Sousa

Just as transphenomenality entails a sort of level-jumping, transdisciplinarity

compels a sort of border-crossing – a need to step outside the limiting frames and
methods of phenomenon specific disciplines (Davis & Phelps, 2005, p. 2).
Acknowledging that knowledge is no longer absolute, simple, aseptic and
decontaminated, it has to be dealed differently at school. Sousa (2012) proposed
the “Curriculum-as-Life” focused on the greatest problems of the humanity in the
present days, in a context of imprevisibility, by Osberg (2005) designated as the
“space of emergence” (p. 82), where knowledge is radically contingent, and not
static.
According to the Centre for a Postmodern World (1990), cited by Slattery
(2006), instead of a modernist knowledge fragmented in disciplines disconnected
with the reality, the curriculum should be imbued with
a post-anthropocentric view of living in harmony with nature rather than a
separateness from nature which leads to control and exploitation;
a post-competitive sense of relationships as cooperative rather than as coercive
and individualistic;
a post-militaristic belief that conflict can be resolved by the development of the art
of peaceful negotiation;
a post-patriarchal vision of society in which the age-old religious, social, political,
and economic subordination of women will be replaced by a social order based on
the “feminine” and the “masculine” equally;
a post-Eurocentric view that the values and practices of the European tradition will
no longer be assumed to be superior to those of other traditions or forcibly imposed
on others, combined with respect for the wisdom embedded in all cultures;
a post-scientific belief that although the natural sciences possess one important
method of scientific investigation, there are also moral, religious and aesthetic
intuitions that contain important truths which must be given a central role in the
development of worldviews and public policy;
a post-disciplinary concept of research and scholarship with an ecologically
interdependent view of the cosmos, rather than the mechanistic perspective of a
modern engineer controlling the universe;
a post-nationalistic view in which the individualism of nationalism is transcended
and replaced by a planetary consciousness that is concerned about the welfare of
the earth first and foremost (Slattery, 2006, p. 20).
With these goals in mind knowledge conveyed (through the curriculum) has
to be as it really is: fluid, discontinuous, ephemeral, unpredictable and chaotic.
No boundaries can maintain different territories impermeable, either in knowledge
or in curriculum.
That is why I consider the curriculum studies have to seriously reflect about
the real meaning of what is a scientific and socially valid knowledge conveyed by
the school in the present context of paradigm shift and be consequent, i.e., be
bold enough to put the reflection into action, the curriculum theory into
development, and assume the change in curriculum practice.

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Received: 13 July 2017

Accepted: 30 September 2017

European Association Portuguese Association

of Curriculum of Curriculum
Studies Studies